Apparently Bosco, according to this packaging, is “America’s most beloved chocolate syrup brand… originally inroduced in 1928,” even if I am completely unfamiliar with the brand.

When I sighted this Bosco bar at World Market, however, I was drawn to the vintage style. Included in the display were also bottles of the chocolate syrup itself, which would be nice to have side by side for the sake of comparison, though I didn’t purchase any of them.

No surprises that sugar is the first thing in the ingredients, but there aren’t any fillers and the vanilla isn’t artificial. The dozen pieces of light milk chocolate are set in a basic mold with thin, diagonal stripes on their surface. While I cannot compare the taste of this chocolate bar to the original syrup, it does have a taste that is believable for a chocolate syrup. First of all, all that sugar shows up with strength. Further, the chocolate flavor tastes old-fashioned to me, like what you would come across at a vintage soda fountain. It has much of the vanilla flavor and not so much of caramel as other milk chocolates. The texture is the rougher kind that most standard candy bar milk chocolates stick to.

So it isn’t an overly special chocolate in itself; I wouldn’t feel I had missed out had I never seen it. Yet even though I had never heard of Bosco, I do enjoy vintage-style candy. This is also supposed to be a limited edition bar, meaning that it pops up for a time just for the fun of it. Enjoy its novelty, end of story.

Comments On This Post

I’ve lived in 8 states in the USA, from East to West, and I’ve never even heard of Bosco before today in the more than 50 years I’ve been alive. I’m a devoted chocolate taster and I’ve never seen it anywhere. Their claim to be “America’s most beloved chocolate syrup brand” may be just a little overstated!

Growing up in Ohio in the ’50s and ’60s, Bosco was the chocolate syrup we used most often for chocolate milk (it was in a bottle; Hershey’s syrup at that time was in a small can). I can still remember the TV commercials.